INTERNATIONAL UNION OF HISTORY & PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE CHAMA NEWSLETTER Commission for History of Ancient and Medieval Astronomy Editors: S.M. Razaullah Ansari, Anne Tihon Vol. 7, No. 1, June 2009 Assistant Secretary: Laurence Tuerlinckx Website: http://chama.fltr.ucl.ac.be FOREWORD BY THE PRESIDENT C ONTENTS : I N T HIS N U M B E R Let me announce gladly that our page Foreword Commission’s Symposium (S-1) has been 1 successfully organised. 2 XXIII International Congress of We are publishing here its programme, which History of Science and Technology, consists of 15 talks, divided into two sessions. The Budapest, 28 July - 2 August 2009 first deals with “Ptolemy, His Writings and their 3 The CHAMA’s symposium in Transmission: Status of Present Research” and the Budapest second is on “Contextual Oriental Studies”. I 4 Astronomy and Mathematics in acknowledge here all speakers, who accepted our Ancient India: Report of the 11 th request to participate in this Symposium. Please note Belgian Indology Day. that each session is divided further into two sub- 6 Report of the International Scientific sessions due to the allotted time slot. The Conference on Mirza Ulughbeg Symposium will be held at the Venue of the 8 Obituary Congress in Room 7 on July 29 and 30 at the 9 New Books following times: 15:00-17:00, 17:30- 19:30. I look forward to meeting all of you in Budapest. Please 11 Periodicals ask your interested friends and colleagues also to attend. 12 Recent publications of the members of CHAMA I may add that the third circular of the Congress is available on its website. There are 13 News and Announcement several new links for the information of the participants. 15 Registration of Membership In this issue, we report details of the “Belgian Indology Day” held in Brussels and devoted to Astronomy and Mathematics. Interesting talks were held concerning ancient and medieval India. We publish also a short report on an international conference held in Samarqand (Uzbekistan), June 9-11, to commemorate the 615th Birth Anniversary of Sultan Ulugh Beg and which was organised by the Uzbek Academy of Science. CHAMA NEWSLETTER 7[1] 1 As in previous issues, we publish here notices of five new books and three new editions of classical works. I may point out particularly the important volume edited by Pankenier, Xu, and Jiang, Historical Observational Records of Comets and Meteor Showers from China, Japan, and Korea. Further, we list the astronomical papers published in the journals: Suhayl, AIHS, JHA, Dio and SCIAMVS. Our list of publications by members is very unsatisfactory indeed. Please help the editors by sending just a list or better copies of your recent published papers, so that the Commission could build a bibliographical database on ancient and medieval astronomy. Last but not the least, I conclude this Foreword at a very sad note. Teacher and friend of many of us, Edward S. Kennedy, passed away in this very ‘Astronomy Year’. We publish his obituary here. I possess personally many a fond memory of that great scholar of Islamic science. I met him for the first time in the First International Symposium on History of Arabic Science, held in Aleppo in 1976 and later several times in Frankfurt at Fuat Sezgin’s Institute. He was always very accessible and he inspired me by his humility and vast knowledge. He sent me unfailingly his preprint or reprints. I was very happy that he could visit India, and participated in the Colloquium on History of Oriental Astronomy, which was organised at New Delhi in 1985, when the General Assembly of International Astronomical Union was held. I could then accompany him especially to Jaipur to visit Raja Sawai Jai Singh Observatory. In his honour, the authorities of the observatory made an exception; they agreed to open the two rooms in which the replicas of Fakhri sextant after Ulugh Beg’s Observatory could be examined. May God shower His Rahmat on his soul and inspire all of us to emulate his scholarship and erudition. S. M. Razaullah ANSARI * * * XXIII INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF HISTORY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY Ideas and Instruments in Social Context Budapest, Hungary 28 July - 2 August July, 2009 Kindly visit the Congress site: http://www.conferences.hu/ichst09/index.htm The 3rd Circular (Organisation, Preliminary Program, General information) is now available: http://www.conferences.hu/ichst09/Third_circular.pdf Abstracts on the web 30 June, 2009 Opening of the Congress 28 July, 2009 Contact Address: Dr. Eva Vamos, Chairperson of LOC: [email protected] and/or her assistant Ms. Marianne Kindl: [email protected] CHAMA NEWSLETTER 7[1] 2 CHAMA SYMPOSIUM S-1 (B UDAPEST 2009) ANCIENT AND MEDIEVAL ASTRONOMY WITH SPECIAL EMPHASIS ON ITS SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT Organisers: S. M. R. ANSARI (India) Chair, Julio SAMS Ó (Spain), Anne TIHON (Belgium) Session I: Ptolemy, His Writings and their Transmission: Status of Present Research Section Ia. Chair: Alexander JONES 1. Alexander JONES (Toronto/Canada): Babylonian and Greek Antecedents of Ptolemy's Tables. 2. Anne TIHON (Louvain-la-Neuve/Belgium): Ptolemy, and His Time: An Unedited Astronomical Papyrus. 3. Raymond MERCIER (Cambridge/UK): Introducing the Edition of the Handy Tables of Ptolemy. 4. Julio SAMSÓ (Barcelona/Spain): Mustawf ī Z īj by Ibn al-Raqq ām of Tunis and Granada (14th c.). Section Ib. Chair: Julio SAMSÓ 5. José BELLVER (Barcelona/Spain): Ptolemaism in al-Andalus: J ābir b. Aflah and the Evolution of the Term Hay’a . 6. Montse DÍAZ -FAJARDO (Barcelona/Spain): On Tasyir . Ptolemy´s Traces in the Islamic West: Ibn Abi-l-Rijal and Alfonso X. 7. K. RAMASUBRAMANIAN (Mumbai/India): Jagann ātha´s Samr āt-Siddh ānta : A Translation of Almagest into Sanskrit. 8. S. M. Razaullah. ANSARI , (Aligarh/India), The Indian Scholar Khayrull āh Muhandis and his Pers ian Translation of al −Tūsī ´s Recension of Almagest . Session II: Contextual Oriental Studies Section IIa. Chair: Raymond MERCIER 9. Michio YANO (Kyoto/Japan): Buddhist Astronomy in its Cultural Context. 10. Sonja BRENTJES (Seville/Spain): Patronage of Astronomy and Astrology in Post-classical Islamic Societies. 11. YUNLI SHI (Hefei/China): Knowledge Secrecy, and the Chinese Assimilation of Islamic Astronomy in the 14 th Century. 12. XIAOCHUN SUN (Beijing/China): The Impact of the Telescope on Astronomy and Society in China. Section IIb. Chair: Anne TIHON 13. S. R. SARMA (Aligarh/India & Düsseldorf/Germany): Yavana-yantra to Yantra-rāja : Reworking of Arabic Astrolabes in India. 14. S. SRIRAM (Chennai/India): Astronomy Part of the Kerala Work, Yuktibh āsha (circa 1530 CE). CHAMA NEWSLETTER 7[1] 3 15. Farid GHASSEMLOU and Fariba SABET (Tehran/Iran): A Survey of Persian Zījes extant in Iran with special stress on their use in Medieval Iranian Society. 16. S.M.R. A NSARI : Final Remarks * * * TH REPORT OF THE 11 BELGIAN INDOLOGY DAY ASTRONOMY AND MATHEMATICS IN ANCIENT INDIA Brussel , April 24, 2009 This Indology day especially devoted to mathematics and astronomy, in the context of ancient India, allowed the lecturers, Sanskritists and/or historians of sciences, to present their topic of research: The observational basis of the Indian planetary models (R. Mercier), the astronomical efforts maintained at the Mughal court (C. Minkowski), the contribution of the astronomers of Kerala (K. Ramasubramanian), the astronomical calculation and devotional poetry (P.-S. Filliozat), the musical applications of mathematics (F. Patte) and algebra (J.M. Delire). There was also a short exhibition of the Indian astronomical instruments preserved in Belgium, particularly of the oldest known Indian astrolabe for instance the astrolabe labelled in Sanskrit in 1605 in Gujrat (India). Website of the Indological studies in Belgium: http://belgianindology.lalibreblogs.be/ SUMMARIES R. MERCIER : The Reality of Indian Astronomy Since the beginning of the interest among European scholars in Indian astronomy, there has been a dispute about its antiquity in general, and the age of certain texts in particular. This dispute could not be solved by exaggerated claims of Indian scholars. Thirty years ago, there was a profound investigation by the French Sanskritist Roger Billard, who presented results that ought to have settled the main features of the history of Indian astronomy.. His work, however, was much disputed in some quarters, not least by the American scholar David Pingree. In this talk, Mercier reviewed Billard’s approach, and demonstrated the strength of his claims. All of his results have been recomputed, and revised where appropriate. At the heart of the dispute about Billard’s work is the question as to whether the parameters of the Indian canons such as that of Āryabha ṭa (ca A.D. 500) were based on observations made by him, or merely inherited from Greek sources. This question has been discussed in detail. J.M. DELIRE : Between astronomy and mathematics, the Indian discoveries in trigonometry: the construction of the tables of the sine Since the Pauli śasiddh ānta , as summarised in the Pañcasiddh āntika of Var āhamihira (6th c.), Indian astronomers used the sine rather than chords, and established tables of the sine for arcs in multiples of 3;45. Contrary to the Pauli śasiddh ānta , Āryabha ṭa (6th c.) presented a table of differences of the sine coupled with a recurrence formula which neither he nor his commentator Bh āskara (629) explained. In order to obtain a ‘proof’ (upapatti ) of the validity of this formula, one had to await for the astronomers of Kerala (14 th -15 th c.), who gave numerous upapatti of trigonometric results. We see in particular how N īlaka ṇṭ ha (1444-ca 1545) and Jye ṣṭ hadeva ( ca 1500-1610) established Āryabha ṭa’s CHAMA NEWSLETTER 7[1] 4 formula, and derived a method of interpolation of sine and cosine for non-tabulated arcs, equivalent to Taylor’s formula.